Racism and Waldorf Education

Ray McDermott and Ida Oberman

Research Bulletin: Waldorf Education Research Institute,
June, 1996

The Research
Bulletin includes an article by editor
Douglas Sloan in response to this article. To order the complete
publication, send $4.00 to the Waldorf Education Research Institute
of North America, Sunbridge College, 260 Hungry Hollow Road, Spring
Valley, NY 10977. Request Research
Bulletin Vol. 1, No. 2 (June,
1996).

He has gradually vanquished
the demon of wine

And he does not get wildly drunk;

But the karma of words remains.

Po chiu-i (ninth century)

In the Spring of 1994, we gathered a team of
classroom experts to visit the Urban Waldorf School in Milwaukee
where Waldorf pedagogy was being used to teach the children of the
inner city. Some of us had extensive experience with Waldorf
schooling, others not, but we were all eager to observe the effects
of a gentle and well-structured learning environment on children from
difficult circumstances. Along with our interest in Waldorf, we all
had some doubts about its limited experience with the education of
children in the inner city (R.P. McDermott, 1992). We went to the
school wanting to learn how it worked and, if it worked well, to tell
others about it. We were all delighted with the school, and we wrote
a long report and a research paper in praise of it (Byers et al.,
1996; McDermott et al., 1996).

This brief note addresses a specific issue that
developed in the course of our study of the school, namely, the
reality of racism in Waldorf education as well as, apparently, in the
teachings of Rudolf Steiner. One of our team members, on the basis of
her time at the Urban Waldorf School, has written glowingly about the
promise of Waldorf education for African American children (Dillard,
1996). If that promise is to be realized, all members of the Waldorf
community will have to appraise critically whatever racism might be
inherent in their world view.

In an early version of the large report, we
included an account of a racially charged discussion brought to the
school by visiting representatives of the international Waldorf
community. In a conversation in an office at the school (for which no
one from the school was present), Steiner's racist speculations about
Africans as close to the body and new to the rational and spiritual
heights achieved by whites on the evolutionary ladder were cited as
possibly relevant to the education of African American children in
Milwaukee. There, in a school using Steiner's ideas in the best
possible way, we were treated to a full display of what we would have
to worry about if we were to invoke Waldorf without reservation as a
model for American education.

Because it might reflect unfairly on the school,
some authors objected to reporting the event. The Urban Waldorf
School is not only educating children who are normally left out of
educational achievement, it is actively confronting racism as well.
The dedicated people at the school do not need to be blamed for the
misconception of visitors, and we removed the account from the report
in exchange for the opportunity to address in these pages one source
of the problem, namely, the unfortunate racism that appears latent in
the Waldorf school movement.

As the report about the school is gentle and
encouraging, this note is equivalently aggressive and
confrontational. The tone, in both cases, is with warrant. Whether
Waldorf decides to back public schools or not, whether Waldorf
decides to give itself to the inner city or not, it is time to
consider the possibility that some naive forms of racism are endemic
to those who embrace anthroposophy without a strong critical sense
for the real possibility that Steiner's speculations about the racial
organization of culture and consciousness were wrong. After the
incident in Milwaukee, with a minimum of attention on our part, a
handful of similar stories from other Waldorf schools working with
African American and Jewish populations began to emerge. These
stories were told by the offended party only, and we cannot cite them
as exacting evidence of racism in Waldorf. To sound an alarm, we need
only to identify them as examples of the kind of race-related
discussions that, despite their being easy to misstate, mishear, or
misquote, can be found in Waldorf contexts. We cite them as evidence
of nothing more than that the Waldorf community, likely because of
Steiner's writings on race, is vulnerable to such
misunderstandings.

A white mother of a successful biracial
(African American and white) child loved her son's Waldorf school
but had to work constantly against teachers who would tell her of
the evolutionary limits of Black children.

A Jewish professor looking for altemative
methods of schooling was told that a Jewish person could not be a
Waldorf teacher.

There is peril in these words, and they are
fortunately contradicted by the actions of many Waldorf educators
running schools, for example, in the Black townships of South Africa
and the inner city of Milwaukee. More important, they are
contradicted by the few African American and many Jewish teachers in
Waldorf schools. But there is a consistency to the complaints. One
version of Waldorf schools is that they are the place to find such
utterances mixed in with more competent accounts of and commitments
to the complexities of the world.

In The Netherlands, the Dutch government recently
launched an investigation of Waldorf schools on charges that they
openly teach racism (de
Volkskrant, 4 February, 1995).
Fortunately, the inquiry placed the responsibility for the problem at
the feet of individual teachers who were reading Steiner uncritically
and using his theories on race as curriculum written in stone. Given
that the cited texts came from Steiner, and given that anthroposophy
is one intellectual environment in which such racist texts are
available for discussion, the inquiry also advised that the Waldorf
system be more careful. In Appendix I, we offer a translation of a
more recent article from the same newspaper with an account of a
deepening crisis. In America, an equivalent charge, if not confronted
quickly and carefully, would lead not only to the destruction of the
Waldorf school movement, it would also mean that many American
children would miss out on the contribution that an emerging Waldorf
influence might bring to classrooms around the country. The same
world that needs so much help from Waldorf education can make use of
charges of racism to make things even worse.

Is Waldorf education up to the challenge of
leading American education away from the treachery of various
racisms? It may be in Milwaukee, but what of the schools that are
yielding the examples cited above? Rudolf Steiner was in many ways a
part of his culture. One vestige of nineteenth-century German
culture, phrased in its most pernicious and unilineal form as the
progress that led to the triumph of the white, Christian and rational
modes of thought, can be found in Steiner's thinking about the
evolution of consciousness. Although scholarly interpreters of
Steiner show repeatedly that his theory of evolution was multilineal
and unusually critical of how the West had bought the myth of science
and rationality at the cost of not understanding the full
complexities of the human situation (Robert McDermott, 1989; Sloan,
1991, 1992), much of Steiner's writing can be read--some would say
misinterpreted--through contemporary sensitivities as Eurocentric in
the worst sense of the term.

In his popular lectures on folk-souls (Volkgeist),
Steiner (1910/1971) was careful to deny the claim that European
whites are "superior" to other races, although the reason is that
"all men in their different incarnations pass through the various
races" (p. 76). The distinction does not save him from talking freely
about the five races of the world as if they were quite different
kinds of humanity, each with a different place in the evolution of
consciousness, right down to the blood that courses through their
bodies. In twentieth-century biology, race has become a highly
suspect category for the description of human variation, and whether
one distinguishes five or five hundred races, the chosen terms in
general contain more human variation within each category than across
categories (see Cavalli-Sforza and Cavalli-Sforza, 1995 for an
updated account; many of the insights were stated well by a previous
generation, for example, in the essays in Montague, 1964). It is
exactly this kind of imprecision that allows various cultural groups
to use racial categories to harbor prejudice and symbolic violence.
In choosing to use the accepted folk terms for race--by color: black,
red, white, yellow and brown--Steiner may have been using an
unfortunate dimension of his own culture to explicate his inquiry
into human evolution. In a later lecture, Steiner (1923) exacerbates
the difficulty with the claim that racial history is the key to
understanding the different modes of thought available to people, and
worse, he traces the various ways of thinking right down to the
propensity of members of different races to rely on different parts
of the brain. His speculations on the importance of skin color are
uninformed, racist and far behind the intellectual developments even
of his own time.

The pernicious, unilineal version of the evolution
of consciousness suggests that through history, in some significant
ways, Europe makes progress over Asia and Africa, Christianity makes
progress over Judaism and rational science makes progress over
traditional ways of thinking. Each advance has a price--white people,
for example, get limited to rational at the expense of more spiritual
ways of knowing--but each is in its way a step that promises a
cumulative progress. Steiner's account of the mental capacities and
habits of different peoples around the world is insensitive. His
speculations are surprising in comparison to the riches evident in
other inquiries by German intellectuals interested in nonwestern ways
of thinking; easily available to Steiner, for example, were the
writings of Leibniz (1716/1994) on the mind of the Chinese, of von
Humboldt (1831/1971) on the thought and language of the Malays and of
anthropologist Franz Boas (1911) on racist accounts of primitive
people. Anthroposophists unwilling to acknowledge the oversight have
missed the point of what is essential in Steiner's educational
thought.

Although Steiner urged his followers to think for
themselves and to adjust his insights for new circumstances, a social
study of anthroposophists in England found that many of them
considered Steiner infallible (Ahern, 1984). If Steiner's theories do
not provide an adequate safeguard from being accepted uncritically by
Waldorf teachers, then his writings on race could be dangerous. It is
difficult to imagine how his speculations on the evolution of
consciousness among different peoples could be applied to individual
children from different traditions without being racist. Few theories
about how the universe works can be easily applied to the full
complexity of individual lives. When any spiritual tradition accepts
a multilived, karmic account of an individual child, there is always
a considerable risk of misjudgment. When a key category in the
interpretation of the child's karmic path through multiple lives is
the individual child's skin color or ethnic background, it is more
than a risk; it is racism, and it is intolerable. It is time to sound
the alarm against the possibility that Waldorf teachers could be
using such ideas to guide their thinking about children in their
classes.

Whatever Steiner did say, whatever he might say if
he were alive today, if only a few Waldorf teachers can nurture what
might be a Steiner-derived anti-Semitic or anti-African American
prejudice, then Waldorf educators will have to critique themselves
before their pedagogy can be of systematic use across the country.
The offending texts must be identfied,
criticized, explained if possible and disowned if
necessary. Appendix II offers an example
from Steiner's The Mission of
Folk-Souls. More than the passages from
the Dutch newspaper quoted in Appendix I, this text is at the core of
the Steiner canon. It can be read perhaps by scholars familiar with a
wide range of Steiner's writings as having nothing to do with the
current arrangements among groups of persons designated by various
racial terms either around the world or, now far from the soils that
nurtured their races of origin, within American cities. Without an
extensive explanation of the text, however, it is much easier to read
the passage as simple racism, with black people once again treated as
the simple children of the earth, close to their senses and
instincts, and no doubt in need of guidance from those less driven by
the instincts of the body. A noncritical reading of such texts could
have been a source for the Dutch Waldorf teacher investigated for
teaching her class about the exceptional sense of rhythm shared by
contemporary black persons.

Waldorf teachers are going to have to add racism
to the list of concerns they must worry about every day before
entering the classroom. The legacy of color racism is karma to
American democracy in much the same way that anti- Semitism follows
Christianity. If Waldorf teachers do not take this challenge to
heart, then Waldorf schools have no place in American
education.

In Milwaukee, Waldorf has given genuinely and
critically to the inner city. With respect to racism, the Urban
Waldorf School seemed to the review team more trustworthy than most
schools, be they public or Waldorf. At its best, the school has
allowed racial issues to emerge forcefully. Faculty members are aware
that they must not only confront the results of racism on their
children, they must confront the very conditions that organize that
racism. One teacher agreed that the children at Urban Waldorf are
happy but wondered if that is enough. "White people," he noted, "have
always wanted black children to be happy. There is no trouble that
way." Making children happy despite unhappy circumstances is an
achievement, but Waldorf schools are expected to do more.

It is a primary principle of Waldorf education to
assume that making children happy in the long run requires that the
children are affirmed in their own strength in the world beyond the
school. If Urban Waldorf can successfully confront racism and develop
educational practices leading to happy, self-affirmed and critical
children, it would be a profound contribution--to the children, to
the Waldorf movement and to American education. We wonder if all
Waldorf teachers are in turn ready to learn from the inner city how
to challenge some of Steiner's dated and unacceptable
speculations.

We can end with two sources of hope. As a
follow-up to the crisis in The Netherlands, German students of
anthroposophy have put together a small volume reporting and
analyzing various fragments of racism that appear in the hundreds of
volumes under Steiner's name (Dietz, 1995). Some of the texts, having
been transcribed by friends from discussions with Steiner, can be
questioned as to their authenticity; others, such as the one reported
in the newspaper translated in Appendix I, can be disowned as
seemingly unconnected to the rest of Steiner's thought; still others,
e.g., the text in Appendix II, are closer to the core of Steiner's
thought and can be either reinterpreted in terms of their historical
context or disowned at the cost of radically reinterpreting a major
theme in Steiner's work.

On the American side, in response to an early
version of this paper, the Association of Waldorf Schools of North
America, in a letter from its Chairman, David Alsop (8 October 1995),
has declared its opposition to any form of racism and its hope that
the incidents described in this paper are rarities and/or
misinterpretations.

"We have resolved to take an honest
and penetrating look at ourselves and our schools to see if indeed
racist attitudes and behavior exist, and to make every effort to
change if this is the case."

The quick response by both the German
anthroposophical and the American Waldorf communities is most
heartening. The struggle against racism in human affairs is likely
endless, and a strong commitment to confront racism in education is
only a first step. If the great majority of Waldorf teachers put
their considerable energies and sensitivities to the task, we can all
look forward to more progress on the issue.

Appendix I

"Some of Steiner's Writings Are in Fact Racist"

[reproduced by permission of the translator]

How should a Waldorf school handle the following
statement, in 1922, of its founder Rudolf Steiner: "I am convinced
that if we get yet another set of Negro novels and give them to
pregnant women to read, then Negroes do not have to come to Europe to
conceive mulattos; just by reading Negro novels, half-blood children
will be born in Europe" (from Steiner's "Health and Illness").

Does anthroposophist Steiner only want to indicate
that a certain Negro novel is excessively dull? Is it a statement
that has to be read in the context of its time? Or does anthroposophy
clearly go too far here?

M. Seelen, a teacher at the de Geert Groote
Waldorf School in Amsterdam, says that anthroposophists have gone too
far. This past summer, he studied Steiner's works and concluded that
they in fact contain racist elements.

In the school's information booklet for the coming
year, Seelen explicitly distanced the school from Steiner's racist
remarks. The school is the first of the 60 Waldorf schools in The
Netherlands to confront directly the racism in Steiner's
writings.

"Steiner was a child of his age," says Seelen. "He
made a number of statements which I would now call disputable. But he
was certainly not a racist. His teachings remain a great source of
inspiration to us."

The Waldorf schools made the news earlier this
year, when it became public that a teacher in Zuphen told his
students to write in their notebooks, in a lesson on "race," that
black people have thick lips and that developmentally they are in the
infant stage. "The teacher made a mistake," says Seelen. "The
curriculum materials at the Waldorf school are put together by the
teachers on the basis of Steiner's pedagogical writings. Everyone
knows that what Steiner said as a philosopher should never be used as
instructional material."

The [federal] school inspector agreed and
concluded that the approach in Zuphen was not representative of all
Waldorf schools. Nonetheless, the subject remains volatile. For
example, two students at the Waldorf school were threatened with
expulsion for wanting to discuss the question of racist prejudices in
Steiner's writings.

"The topic is delicate," Seelen observes.
"Teachers at Waldorf schools are incredibly involved in their work.
Criticism from the outside is often perceived as threatening." Seelen
is trying to stimulate discussion within the anthroposophical
community and hopes that other Waldorf schools will recognize that
Steiner is not infallible.

Vice-President of the Anthroposophical Association
of The Netherlands and a teacher at the Waldorf school in The Hague,
C. Weigart, is afraid that these events will lead to a split in the
Waldorf community between those he calls the "realo's" and the
"fundamentalists." Weigart further argues that "Steiner never made
statements now considered racist in any discussion of Waldorf
education. Does it make sense, then, to ask each Waldorf school now
to make a point of distancing itself from these statements?"

According to Weigart, Steiner's anthroposophical
texts can only be understood on the basis of thorough research.
Seelen, on the other hand, points to the findings of a research
project, to be published soon, covering 350 volumes in Steiner's
collected works. The researchers conclude that the volumes contain a
number of racist passages. For encouragement, Seelen also points to
Steiner's own words in Science of the
Mysteries of the Soul; Steiner encouraged
careful readers "to test what they read through personal insights and
life experiences."

Appendix II

(from Rudolf Steiner 1910/197l: pp. 75-76)

[There is] for example a point or center of cosmic
influence situated in the interior of Africa. At this center are
active all those terrestrial forces emanating from the soil which can
influence man especially during his childhood. Later on their
influence diminishes; man is less subject to these forces.
Nevertheless their formative influence makes a powerful impression
upon him. The locality where people live exercises its most potent
influence in early childhood and thereby determines for their whole
life those who are completely dependent on these forces, so that the
particular locality impresses the characteristics of their early
childhood permanently upon them. This is more or less typical of all
those who, in respect to their racial character, are determined by
the etheric formative forces of the earth in the neighborhood of that
local locality. The black or Negro race is substantially determined
by these childhood characteristics.

If we now cross over to Asia, we find a point or
center where the formative forces of the earth impress permanently on
man the particular characteristics of later youth or adolescence and
determine his racial character. Such races are the yellow and brown
races of our time.

If we continue northward and then turn in a
westerly direction towards Europe, a third point or center is reached
which permanently impresses upon man the characteristics of his adult
life. In this way man is determined by the etheric forces emanating
from the earth. When we look more closely into these separate points
or centers we find that they follow a line which takes an unusual
direction. These centers still exist today. The center in Africa
corresponds to those terrestrial forces which imprint on man the
characteristics of early childhood; the center in Asia corresponds to
those which give man the characteristics of youth, and the
corresponding center in Europe imprints upon man the characteristics
of maturity. This is a simple universal law. Since all men in their
different incarnations pass through the various races the claim that
the European is superior to the black and yellow races has no real
validity.

References

Ahern, Geoffrey. 1984. Sun at Midnight: The Rudolf Steiner Movement and the
Western Esoteric Tradition.
Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: The Aquarian Press.